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Venezuela Is Falling Apart

Thoreau72 said:
Certainly nothing in the mainstream media, no. But if the CIA were involved in it, would notice be published in the msm? Not likely.

Until Hasenfuss was shot down in Central America all those years ago, nobody had been told by the mainstream media of any CIA involvement.

What makes the CIA a suspect is its decades long record of regime change. Venezuela had fairly warm relations with Russia and the Russian navy some years back. The animosity between the US government and Chavez and his successor has been well known.

China and Russia don't seem to do things that way. The old soviets just invaded a country to bring it into line. The Chinese exercise their foreign influence through mutually beneficial commercial efforts and gifts such as the soccer stadium they built for at least one African country.

No, an ordinary citizen cannot prove any CIA involvement, and until Snowden came along, no citizen could prove the NSA was gathering all that illegal data. I merely speculate there is such involvement in the recent events in Venezuela and Brazil.
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The flip side of all that is, why waste resources in Venezuela when the country is headed that way already? I don't think the CIA needed to do anything at all in this case.
 
Anthony60 said:
The flip side of all that is, why waste resources in Venezuela when the country is headed that way already? I don't think the CIA needed to do anything at all in this case.
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Because we can? Because overthrowing governments is our modus operandi for 50 years?

"waste" is a word that government bureaucrats do not understand. The word and the concept do not exist for them. They get paid by the year, no matter the result.

But in this day of finite resources, the oil wealth of Venezuela is very attractive.
 
Thoreau72 said:
Because we can? Because overthrowing governments is our modus operandi for 50 years?

"waste" is a word that government bureaucrats do not understand. The word and the concept do not exist for them. They get paid by the year, no matter the result.

But in this day of finite resources, the oil wealth of Venezuela is very attractive.
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They love to waste, but mostly our money on themselves. The only other reason I can think of is that they would get involved so that they could take credit internally.

Again, they seemed to have done a pretty good job destroying their economy on their own. Years ago, that was a wealthy country. Takes some real incompetence to take down a country with such oil resources.
 
Anthony60 said:
They love to waste, but mostly our money on themselves. The only other reason I can think of is that they would get involved so that they could take credit internally.

Again, they seemed to have done a pretty good job destroying their economy on their own. Years ago, that was a wealthy country. Takes some real incompetence to take down a country with such oil resources.
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To borrow from the lyrics of the band U2, "gold is the reason for the wars we wage". :)
 
joG said:
This is what socialist autocratic systems do.state power can stave disaster off for a long time, while social policies and public production of private goods undermine economic efficiency first and then society's basis. The collapse can be unexpected and faster than seems possible. We have seen this before. No surprise.
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Yeah. Canada, Australia, Sweden, Finland, France are all perfect examples of this socialist autocratic system you speak of. :roll:
 
Middleground said:
Yeah. Canada, Australia, Sweden, Finland, France are all perfect examples of this socialist autocratic system you speak of. :roll:
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Don't forget NKR, China, etc... Those places you name have a lot of social programs and high taxes, but the people are relatively free. Not all that socialist.
 
Anthony60 said:
Don't forget NKR, China, etc... Those places you name have a lot of social programs and high taxes, but the people are relatively free. Not all that socialist.
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My point was that some here link socialism with all kinds of terrible things.
 
Middleground said:
Yeah. Canada, Australia, Sweden, Finland, France are all perfect examples of this socialist autocratic system you speak of. :roll:
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I do not know Canada and Australia nor their histories of socialization well enough to comment an them.

Also, when we talk of the socialization process or political organization of a society, we are looking and a large number of factors and the implications that derive from the differently used economic and political instruments. The instrument mixes usually associated with socialism can have been more or less extensively established and structured. They were and are. Depending on the structure they draw down economic efficiency in different ways and at differing rates. The political system is more or less well capable of sustaining the direction of these losses by hiding them outright of by in-transparencies of differing kind. Autocracies have tended to implement more rigorously and hide more forcefully. That combination has tended to be relatively stable over long periods and to crash spectacularly.

In Europe the social-democratic phenomenon installed the social packages and huge socialist bureaucracies the programs require more slowly and so with slower damage being wrought. Allowing them to become wealthier during the initial periods. Something similar has happened in the US. None the less there were cases, where they had already shown their weakness like in Sweden, where the system was totally reworked a few decades ago. Recently a number of the OECD democracies have begun to lose their competitiveness to a degree that makes the social programs un-sustainable. Where external shocks hit at a bad time like in Greece or Spain and Portugal or to a good extent Italy, the unemployment rates exploded. In Germany the process of rollback was already well underway in 2008, when the crisis came. It has not been enough to stop the leakage, but compared to the others it was timely and will give the elite more time to downsize to a sustainable level. Finland is now experimenting in a total demolition of the dysfunctional socialization system by using a minimum income not unlike the negative tax that the US experimented with around 1970 with relatively good results. Holland is looking at such a program and the Swiss will hold a referendum. All of these socialist systems have failed in the sense that they are much less efficient than alternatives and cannot even be sustained over the long term.

Over the long term, one might keep it with Keynes and say we are all dead. The thing is, as it is turning out in de social democracies in Europe, that the elderly are still alive and having been misled to believe that they were safe and would be cared for after having paid large proportions of their income to the state bureaucracies and voting for the lying politicians instead of for those that told the truth are finding the social systems no longer keeping the promises. And that cohort is really doing badly in more and more countries on the continent with no way to save themselves in societies gone stagnant because of social overspending and regulation. Just look at the unemployment numbers.
 
Anthony60 said:
Well, that's because it is linked with all kinds of terrible things.
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Canada, Sweden, Finland, Australia are all socialist countries. They're also countries that have the happiest people.

Don't be afraid of the boogieman.
 
joG said:
I do not know Canada and Australia nor their histories of socialization well enough to comment an them.

Also, when we talk of the socialization process or political organization of a society, we are looking and a large number of factors and the implications that derive from the differently used economic and political instruments. The instrument mixes usually associated with socialism can have been more or less extensively established and structured. They were and are. Depending on the structure they draw down economic efficiency in different ways and at differing rates. The political system is more or less well capable of sustaining the direction of these losses by hiding them outright of by in-transparencies of differing kind. Autocracies have tended to implement more rigorously and hide more forcefully. That combination has tended to be relatively stable over long periods and to crash spectacularly.

In Europe the social-democratic phenomenon installed the social packages and huge socialist bureaucracies the programs require more slowly and so with slower damage being wrought. Allowing them to become wealthier during the initial periods. Something similar has happened in the US. None the less there were cases, where they had already shown their weakness like in Sweden, where the system was totally reworked a few decades ago. Recently a number of the OECD democracies have begun to lose their competitiveness to a degree that makes the social programs un-sustainable. Where external shocks hit at a bad time like in Greece or Spain and Portugal or to a good extent Italy, the unemployment rates exploded. In Germany the process of rollback was already well underway in 2008, when the crisis came. It has not been enough to stop the leakage, but compared to the others it was timely and will give the elite more time to downsize to a sustainable level. Finland is now experimenting in a total demolition of the dysfunctional socialization system by using a minimum income not unlike the negative tax that the US experimented with around 1970 with relatively good results. Holland is looking at such a program and the Swiss will hold a referendum. All of these socialist systems have failed in the sense that they are much less efficient than alternatives and cannot even be sustained over the long term.

Over the long term, one might keep it with Keynes and say we are all dead. The thing is, as it is turning out in de social democracies in Europe, that the elderly are still alive and having been misled to believe that they were safe and would be cared for after having paid large proportions of their income to the state bureaucracies and voting for the lying politicians instead of for those that told the truth are finding the social systems no longer keeping the promises. And that cohort is really doing badly in more and more countries on the continent with no way to save themselves in societies gone stagnant because of social overspending and regulation. Just look at the unemployment numbers.
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Here's a list of the top 10 happiest countries in the world, 2015. The rankings are based-on several factors including education, employment, life satisfaction, income, health, and the environment. Take a look at the list and tell me what is the main commonality.

1) Switzerland
2) Norway
3) Canada
4) Denmark
5) Austria
6) Iceland
7) Australia
8) Finland
9) Sweden
10) Netherlands
 
Middleground said:
Here's a list of the top 10 happiest countries in the world, 2015. The rankings are based-on several factors including education, employment, life satisfaction, income, health, and the environment. Take a look at the list and tell me what is the main commonality.

1) Switzerland
2) Norway
3) Canada
4) Denmark
5) Austria
6) Iceland
7) Australia
8) Finland
9) Sweden
10) Netherlands
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None of them have hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens pouring across the border from Mexico and living off their tax dollars?
 
Middleground said:
Here's a list of the top 10 happiest countries in the world, 2015. The rankings are based-on several factors including education, employment, life satisfaction, income, health, and the environment. Take a look at the list and tell me what is the main commonality.

1) Switzerland
2) Norway
3) Canada
4) Denmark
5) Austria
6) Iceland
7) Australia
8) Finland
9) Sweden
10) Netherlands
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And I want to live in none of them.
 
apdst said:
None of them have hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens pouring across the border from Mexico and living off their tax dollars?
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No, you are wrong, so let me help you. They are all socialist countries.

Mexicans only help the US. They are willing to work the jobs Americans don't want.
 
Middleground said:
Here's a list of the top 10 happiest countries in the world, 2015. The rankings are based-on several factors including education, employment, life satisfaction, income, health, and the environment. Take a look at the list and tell me what is the main commonality.

1) Switzerland
2) Norway
3) Canada
4) Denmark
5) Austria
6) Iceland
7) Australia
8) Finland
9) Sweden
10) Netherlands
Click to expand...

Beware of sociological indicators. When someone answers she is happy in one culture that is not comparable with the same answer for someone in another culture. The indexes are usually published for political reasons by those that have a vested interest or by those that want to fill copy and think that the readers will be happy with such meaningless trivia. Were you really interested, you would take a closer look at the countries you name and find that each is very different and that the reasons for contentment are quite different from case to case. As that would probably, assuming that you are of socio-economic profession and know statistics well enough, take you a good amount of time just to compare the countries superficially, I suspect you will not do so and thus prefer living with the story you like. This feature of human nature is the strongest reason for people like Sanders', socialists' and social democrats' success on the streets.

PS: One major commonality is probably a small and relatively homogeneous population and an economy that is not faltering relative to its neighbors. But that would be one of the things you might want to check up on. Austria, Sweden and Holland are presently entering a transitional phase and Finland is thinking about eliminating the whole social system and replacing it, because it is too costly in its present form.
 
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joG said:
Beware of sociological indicators. When someone answers she is happy in one culture that is not comparable with the same answer for someone in another culture. The indexes are usually published for political reasons by those that have a vested interest or by those that want to fill copy and think that the readers will be happy with such meaningless trivia. Were you really interested, you would take a closer look at the countries you name and find that each is very different and that the reasons for contentment are quite different from case to case. As that would probably, assuming that you are of socio-economic profession and know statistics well enough, take you a good amount of time just to compare the countries superficially, I suspect you will not do so and thus prefer living with the story you like. This feature of human nature is the strongest reason for people like Sanders', socialists' and social democrats' success on the streets.
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:roll: Keep on trying to deny it if it makes you feel better.
 
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